Mr. DeFAZIO. No one's district, with perhaps the exception of the other gentleman from Oregon, is impacted more than mine by the issue of counties and schools. And no one has worked harder to try to get it included. And actually it was said yesterday that we didn't have a vote in the House on county schools. We did, actually, in May, and the Republicans chose to side with Big Oil instead of with counties and schools. I got 218 votes, but I needed a two-thirds majority to pass it.

And it was also included in an energy package last year, a major energy initiative sent by the House to the Senate which was filibustered by 41 Republican Senators, again, over the issue of protecting Big Oil.

So the record's pretty clear here. I appreciate the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee saying he's going to work with us and try to help us with this vehicle or other vehicles in the closing days of this Congress to get this critical funding, and I take heart with that because he's an honorable man.

We've got another problem, and it is downtown. It's called George Bush. Here is the President's statement on county schools: ``Finally, the administration opposes new, mandatory funding for payments in lieu of taxes, and believes that any extension of rural community payments should be phased out, as it has previously proposed. The administration urges Congress to eliminate all such provisions from the final bill.'' All such provisions. That's the President's position.

If this President would lift one pinky, we would have county school funding. He muscled $465 million in foreign aid into the continuing resolution that passed the House yesterday because he wanted $365 million for Georgia, but he didn't ask for a penny for county schools here in the United States of America. And by the way, that wasn't Georgia the State, that's Georgia the country overseas; one of his favorite places, I guess.

If we just had a little bit of help downtown, we could get this done. And we're not done here yet. We're going to fight like heck in the next 2 days to get it.